"Although there are perhaps viable alternatives to flying for domestic travel within the continental United States, such as traveling by car or train, the court disagrees with (the government's) contention that international air travel is a mere convenience in light of the realities of our modern world," Brown wrote.

Yeah, no kidding. That somebody could sincerely espouse such a position is mind-boggling to me. It ranks up there with "Gay people can already get married too (to the opposite sex)."

Somewhere along the way, we decided that the threat of terrorism outweighed our constitutional rights. In the heat of the moment after 9/11, it may have seemed right (to some), but the further we get from the event, the more people are starting to see that there is a problem.

These right should not be abridged for any reason. That, or they are not rights.

I've never thought about the issue of international air travel, but yes, I agree with the court. When there's no alternative, you need due process. (Even when there is, due process is always nice to have when you declare yourself "the" democracy for others to emulate.)

As I write the reply, I am becoming even more angry that the government can restrict one's activities without any judicial oversight. It's such a simple "check and balance" to add and it's one that makes people really happy. How dumb could you be to try and take away people's rights without even implementing the simplest possible administrative hearing?

I simply do not understand what kind of threat a person can pose, that makes it impossible for them to safely board an aircraft - after an 'enhanced' search. What harm could they possibly cause on a plane, that they couldn't on a train, a bus, or a movie theater?

Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator. I'll back up what pg said with a data point from academic research. The online article "How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist,"

by a Nobel laureate in physics who is a native speaker of Dutch, makes clear what the key learning task is to be a good physicist: "English is a prerequisite. If you haven't mastered it yet, learn it. You must be able to read, write, speak and understand English." On his list of things to learn for physics, that even comes before mathematics.

I like to share advice on language learning, because this topic comes up on Hacker News frequently. I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.

It's a universal truth of saying things in public. No matter how clearly you say things, somebody will take it the wrong way. The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people.

For all his discussion about "strong foreign accents" being a big weakness, it is interesting that pg doesn't seem capable of recognizing his own huge weaknesses (and almost all of the 200+ comments - particularly the top-ranked ones - seem to miss that too)

1. At best, pg badly miscommunicated what he was trying to say. He could have just said something like 'founders who cannot communicate well' or 'founders who can't be understood' etc. - but he chose specifically to refer to "strong foreign accents".

Arguably, some Americans might find it easier to understand some foreign accents (strong British accents, some Indian accents etc) than some American accents (e.g. some rural southern accents). More to the point, some folks with foreign accents can speak much better English and articulate their ideas (and make themselves understood) much better than many people speaking in a mainstream American accent. However, pg chose to use the "strong foreign accent" criterion instead of the more correct "communicate well" criterion.

2. imo a stubborn refusal to acknowledge mistakes/errors is a big weakness and pg is demonstrating that weakness with passive-aggressive pushbacks like the one on Twitter "Don't say things people want to misunderstand."

Sorry, I think pg's statement was either blatantly wrong or badly expressed/communicated, but that doesn't amount to me being a part of the alleged "looking-for-reasons-to-be-offended patrol" that one of the commenters below talks about. pg (and his defenders on hn) will be better served by trying to understand the criticism instead of making up false motives for the critics of his statement.

<edit> Ten minutes after I posted the comment, it was at 3 points. Thirty minutes later, it was at ZERO points, one hour later at -1 :) In addition to showing the net-points for each comment, I wish HN also showed the total number of upvotes and downvotes each comment receives.

I work at a hospital full of the most brilliant foreign doctors, but many of them have accents too, too thick to accurately relay and discuss very complex and critical medical information. That is not in any way a reflection of their intelligence or work ethic in the least. They are smart, and they've proven that with numerous tests and years of training. But when effective communication is hindered, there is damage to confidence, mutual understanding, and progress. Confusion amongst doctors and nurses hurt patient management. Families who don't understand what they're being told feel less confident in the physician caring for their loved one because no clear direction or assessment is articulated.

And PG here is saying no different. Communication is just as essential in running a startup as it is in managing a patient. Your investors rely on your communication abilities to accurately assess the state of your company. Cofounders need to understand you for decisions to be made. Employees need to feel confident in their leader and the direction they're moving in.

This isn't xenophobic at all. Foreign accents, here in America, probably make up the majority of communication issues. I'm sure PG would've mentioned stammering and stuttering if it were significant in his data, but it likely wasn't. How many people do you know with thick foreign accents and how many with other communication hindrances?

Don't worry about it, PG, you just had a run-in with the looking-for-reasons-to-be-offended patrol. I actually thought this would happen when I read the post, but I also understood what you mean. It's a fairly benign point if we're honest and give you the benefit of the doubt: communication is important for a startup. Heavy accents are a barrier to effective communication.

I speak a foreign language that I learned later in life, so I speak it with an ugly American accent. People sometimes have trouble understanding me when I speak, and even though I know all the words native speakers use, I know I'm missing the subtleties and undercurrents in language. We take these things for granted in our native language, but understanding the associations with common phrases and subtle connotations of words takes many years to learn. Many native speakers miss these subtleties from time to time.

I would never (at my current skill level) try to start a company where I'd have to rely on my foreign language skill. I'm fluent in the language, but nowhere close to native skill. I wouldn't trust myself to explain a product - especially a technical product - in a clear and convincing manner.

"Offending people is a necessary and healthy act. Every time you say something that's offensive to another person, you just caused a discussion. You just forced them to have to think." Louis C.K.

Um. Ok. ...and I appreciate that PG wanted to make this clear as the press loves to make a story where there isn't one. But do we really need to vote this up like crazy to guarentee it is the top story for the next 48 hours? Are there really that many people here who will benefit from this lesson?

I think the problem really arose because he said foreign accent. So if it was someone American with an incredibly thick and hard-to-understand accent that would be fine? It wouldn't, if what he really cares about is comprehension.

> I'd thought of just letting this controversy blow over.

A common PG tactic, this (see also the "HN mods wilfully ruin submission titles" storm). But probably not a great one to emulate: time and again here we've seen startups badly burnt by the "fuck up in public and don't say or post anything hoping it will blow over" stance.

Even if it does blow over, you've damaged your image. People might treat you the same, but they'll long remember that time you ran away and hid when people expected better of you.

Here's a startup idea: help people speak English well. I live in France, my kids don't speak English at all. I send them to the "American School of Paris" on weekends for a so-called "immersion program" where most kids are French. Results are a little disappointing, and the thing is quite expensive. Yet the waiting list to get in is immense, people are willing to fight to get in.

I'd pay a very high price for an app or a program that young kids would love / do willingly, that would result in them becoming fluent in English.

I am not a native english speaker (indian) even though I moved to the US at the age of 16. I am 32 now. I have a fairly "neutralized" accent according to my native speaker friends. How did I get there ? Over 16 years of practice by listening to music, watching movies and most importantly, how my co-workers/colleagues communicate and express themselves. I still do that today when I can. Just a habit.

I am not interested in commenting whether PG should have said what he said or not but I do think that if you have a thick accent, you need to work on it and not just assume that people understand what you are saying even if your grammar is great.

My advice as a non native speaker.

-Talk slow. Lot of foreign languages are spoken fastly and hence when they switch to english, they go at the same pace. Don't do that. Try and space out the words.

- Ensure that the each word is spoken clearly and not mixed together. Instead of saying "how'r you", start with "How are you" ? Once you get a hang of it, you can switch to the faster version.

- Just working on specific letters can make a lot of difference. For example, the letter 'T'. In Indian languages, people hit that letter really hard. So when they pronounce something like "want", it sounds like "wantttt". The tongue rolling should be minimal here.

- Watch english shows, movies, listen to music, radio whatever. Dont just stick to your own language. Socialize with people who don't speak your native language. Observe them and learn.

- Most importantly, understand that just being able to speak english with perfect grammar is not enough. You need to do more. Nothing wrong with admitting this fact and working on it. Just my 2 cents.

There are "things you can't say".[1] You can be right, and your message can be harmless but the way you communicate it comes so close to a cultural taboo button that it requires too much extra effort not to be misunderstood. You just probably shouldn't go there. It will cause misunderstanding. Its kind of like having a thick "cultural accent".

For example, I used to, but do not now, ever use the word "niggle". Its just too much work.

This is one of the few cases where this is worth repeating: correlation is not causation.

PG is definitely one of the foremost researchers in the realm of entrepreneurial success factors, but it is important to step back for a moment when analyzing such things as verbal accents and "Zuckerberg likeness" correlating with failure and success, respectively.

Just as Noam Chomsky criticized Peter Norvig because of his focus on statistical methods versus fundamental models, I would suggest that inferring success based on statistical observation without an underlying model can become a confusing and unrewarding process.

Statistics is a tool to test fundamental models, not a model to explain phenomena all in itself. As such, I would guess that founder success is more likely based upon mundane traits such as intrinsic motivation, intellect, experience, access to capital and key personnel, and most importantly, luck. We see this time and time again in superstars such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, John Carmack, Bill Gates, etc.

Extremely smart people are more prone to analyzing every tiny variable, which sometimes causes them to give additional weight to trivial factors in a complex equation.

And he was successful in the USA. (Edward Teller was similar they say.)

But it is different than it is for most people:1. They were so good that they could not ignore them.2. Science is different than business.

So for the rest of us it is extremely important to learn English well. I am sometimes almost fustrated that I cannot express myself in a sophisticated way in english.:( And I know that it never will be perfect. A Hungarian writer Sandor Marai only wrote in Hungarian despite speaking fluently in several languages (English, German, French and who knows in what other languages), and living as an emigrant in at least half of his life. (He emigrated from communism at the half of his life) He said he cannot 'write' (as a writer) in other languages (by his extremely high standards).

I think some of the folks here are casting aspersions on the folks arguing with PG - there are some reasonable arguments in there.

PG's stance (my interpretation) is - (1) Founders need to sell to be effective and (2) Having a strong accent makes it hard to communicate effectively and in turn, sell.

I get that (I have an accent myself).

People are objecting to the underlying assumption that this causation is something we deem acceptable. Here's a counter example. (1) Founders need to sell (2) Part of selling is to make the audience identify with you, so founders who look/act like their audience do better. This suddenly becomes a slippery slope, even if that's a perfectly logical argument.

I don't see how this is a discussion. His point is completely valid, and holds true for many things.

If you were to become a public speaker/motivational speaker in Canada, then not being able to be understood in either English or French would affect your career.

It seems to me like everybody is caught up in the semantics of whether pointing this out is politically correct or not. I personally think it doesn't matter, and if you're truly committed on creating a startup in the US, you'll have to just persevere regardless of the opinions, as this is just a remark on data.

I think the reason people got slightly sniffy about it was the use of the word 'foreign' in a negative context, which, whether or not it is intended, will be interpreted by some as xenophobic. Had it been stated as '...having unintelligible accents...' it would probably have passed without note.

Oddly enough this is a re-hash of the same types of arguments used for why engineers could never be CEO's and run startups. They didn't speak the language of business, weren't good communicators. "Go hire a 6'3" white sales guy CEO if you are really serious about this startup and raising money from VC's"

ValleyWag and the whole of Gawker Media are just fucking WORST. They have a long record of doing scummy things just to generate views. I've lost all respect for them when their editor published the Brett Favre dick picks story, which was told to him by Jenn Sterger in a private, friendly, off-the-record conversation, after she specifically asked him not to publish it. Unsurprisingly, that resulted in her career being completely destroyed after that.

Stephen Hawking and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston (aka "Mumbles") are examples of people who have experienced difficulty making themselves understood (either through medical conditions or strong accents), yet are leaders in their respective domains. In entrepreneurship, one example that springs to mind is Charles Pfizer, who started a successful chemical company a year after arriving in the United States from Germany in the 1840s. I assume he spoke with a heavy accent which may have been difficult for some employees and customers to understand, yet his company flourished.

Let's not equate "poor English" with "likely to fail at X". There are other factors, ranging from domain knowledge to soft skills, that come into play as well.

Pronunciation is absolutely a part of spoken language. You could probably make a decent argument that somebody who can't pronounce the spoken word in such a way that other people understand them doesn't completely know the language.

Look, I respect PG as much as the next person so this is not a slight against him since I feel HN far too often comes to his defence as if protecting their newborn. Having said that ...

I don't understand how a man of his stature and someone in his position can allow himself to make those statements about accents (or anything that sounds remotely xenophobic). I say that because even his blog post says the following:

"A startup founder is always selling. Not just literally to customers, but to current and potential employees, partners, investors, and the press as well ... there is little room for misunderstanding."

That statement doesn't just hold for startups but for anyone in business. His initial statements left plenty of room for misunderstanding. Furthermore, I would also find it very difficult to believe that his inclination towards avoiding "excessive" accents does not also subconsciously lead him to have a slight bias against founders with a "slight" accent. That's how biases work - the threshold for when your brain decides to evoke that bias is not black-and-white.

Why not just narrow it down to communication barriers? It has really nothing specifically to do with accents. Two people with the same heavy accents may perfectly understand the other - or maybe not at all. That still comes down to issue with communication. How about making the statement that 3 year olds are terrible CEOs - they're terrible at conveying a story, and I'm not even sure they're speaking English when they make sounds!

I wonder if general tests of written and verbal communication skills would show the same correlation. I often notice poor word choices, confusing sentence structure, and pretty obvious typos in many of the blog posts that show up on HN. Some of these people are founders. I wonder if their companies suffer due to these sorts of errors (or perhaps they just proofread business communications better).

Back around 1997 when I was fighting my Internet ban on First Amendment grounds[1], one honest journalist told me the deal. He told me that journalists are not my PR agent. They have their own agenda, and their own angle. Their goal is to get readers, not to spread the message you want them to spread.

I still have nightmares about the accent of the TA running the linear algebra class I took in college 20ish years ago. He was a Vietnamese man speaking "perfect" English, but not in a way that could be understood by virtually anyone, and I'm usually pretty good with understanding strong accents.

I have nothing against people with accents, I'm friends with and co-worker with quite a few people who have significant accents but are still understandable. However, there are certainly cases where accents are so strong that the person is arguably not really speaking the language even if their grammer is impeccable. And I say that fully understanding that the same applies if I find myself for any reason butchering the French language or Mandarin Chinese verbally.

The crazy thing is I used to have a boss who was native to India until late childhood, and (so the story went) had taught himself English, largely by watching American TV. The guy now has zero accent. So I was somewhat skeptical. But maybe some people as part of their personality just pick up on pronunciation faster than others?

Totally agree. I've been at demo days and I just tune out the foreigners who I can't understand. It's hard enough having to listen to 40+ startups in a day, and try to understand what someone is doing, why they are doing it, and how it can make money, throw in a thick accent and you are likely to give your brain a rest and just tune out. I notice that these founders are the ones with no one visiting their demo table, etc.

I'm French and I speak english everyday since 5 years (foreign girlfriends) I just can't pronounce this language correctly, the mouth positions required are simply to far from my native tongue. And in the morning it's even worse.I think there is an elocution max level for each of us that's very hard to pass (I suppose that would involve some kind of specific elocution training), whereas the vocabulary always grow.I've met people living in the same foreign country for 20 years and still have a very strong native accent.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but for me the controversial bit wasn't about accents and communication, but correlating a strong accents to intelligence.

"Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you're going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent."

I recall working in a lab with a lot of foreign grad students from different backgrounds (under a professor with a bit of an accent). There were definitely times the accents interacted in interesting ways, where some would understand completely and others would have no clue what was said (even after several repetitions) until someone else said it.

As a founder with a very strong Latino accent, I would like to share my success with other entrepreneurs who speak English as a second language: If you want a professionally recorded voice over for your demo video, pitch, or whatever, can get one for FREE from VoiceBunny here: http://blog.voicebunny.com/2013/08/30/no-startup-left-behind...

Much respect to Paul here. I've been impressed with his willingness to engage the press in rebuttals and elaborations (and in a polite, clear way). I've made it a personal rule not to be quoted in anything controversial just because, even if the reporter is well-meaning, the editor may not be. I suspect Paul is even more aware of this and so his willingness to communicate is a sign of how important he believes his message is.

It is ironic that a statement about the importance of being understood clearly by others , was itself not understood clearly by others, although the conversation was presumably between native speakers with no accents. My point is that foreign accents are just one manifestation of the larger problem of communication that occurs far more frequently than any of us supposes. My favorite quote about this problem is from George Bernard Shaw : "The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

I think the NYT reporter Nathaniel Rich hit on something when he commented that PG made an 'evil Soviet henchman' voice. I don't think he was intending to sound evil, but only to imitate a Russian accent. The 'evilness' comes from the NYT reporter's mind. And I think the failure of start-ups with foreigners with bad English language skills is also likely due to their recruitment efforts - you'd tend to hire only people who speak your native language if you can't speak English very well, thus your hiring pool is quite small.

I'm Russian and was running an ed tech company for the last 2 years. Even thought I rate my English skills reasonably high and I've finished one of the top universities in London with the top grade, once we were at the stage when we need to sell our product, I was completely lost. While talking to native people I was kept noticing how bad my accent was and I think because I've been critical to myself, I felt over time even worse about my accent and ability to fluently communicate what I was doing.It's definitely affected our sales numbers and ability to raise capital. Our company was losing credibility in front of the customers eyes, because of inability to keep up with the conversation pace. After hiring native sales and bizdev people our numbers have grown up. I would advice non-native speakers to keep improving there accent and ability to fluently communicate by getting English tutor or personal-dev trainer or by any other means that I would be happy to hear.

Having learned English, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Portoguese I am ready to share my secret to the world: read comics.They are the only written form of the colloquial language, the one you'll need mostly.Literally 100% of what you learn in a comic will be useful in your daily life.Read a novel and this drops to probably 50%, read a newspaper and it's even worse.Nobody speaks like a book or a newspaper. We speak like comics.

P.S.I learned those while living in those countries, so I was exposed to the spoken language too. Plus, comics worked for me, they won't work for everybody.At the end the real trick is to try several methods and find the one which suits you best.

One theory for the "why" - I find it takes a higher cognitive load to understand someone with a strong accent. As a result, I don't digest the message as well and I'm subconsciously biased against complex conversations. I wonder if there is any cognitive psych literature on this?

Advice to those with a strong accent: find a way to communicate your message so it takes minimal effort for a receiver to understand. That could be improved English, but there might be easier ways for you to hack this - concise language, use concrete metaphors, keep printed slides in your briefcase, etc.

People underestimate the level of skill required to speak a language well enough so that it is not a chore for a native speaker to listen.

The chairman of the English Department of my local community college (College of Marin in California) told me that it takes an immigrant an average of 7 years to get good enough at speaking English for native speakers to actually want to listen to them talk.

I cannot find it now, but I listened to a podcast (possibly four thought) with a discussion on disappearing languages. The professor had been approached by a woman asking how she could help her children, who were losing the native language as it died out. He replied if she really wanted to help her children she should encourage them to learn English and not the native language - they will benefiot more from communicating with nearly 2 bn people than with a few thousand in the locale.

(I seem to remember that Papua New Guinea has a language every mile along its northern coast - mainly it seemed to piss off the neighbouring tribes)

When you have a thick accent, poor grammar, and generally have trouble expressing your thoughts in English, people will perceive you as less smart - no matter how eloquent you sound in your native language.

If you have a team with many different accents, a CEO who speaks with excellent "transatlantic English" (international/mixed-British-American English) will also likely be easiest for all the other team members to understand. It's about being a more central node in mutual communication/intelligibility networks, rather than a leaf node.

It's funny, the communication difficulty applies to PG as well. PG could be much more prominent if he had a better speaking ability. His speeches are really bad, he reads of the paper and 'ums' all the way through. I've never managed to sit one through. If it wasn't for that he could've gotten the press coverage of a major tech CEO.

And that's the reason I am packing my stuff and heading to London. At this very moment. I was just about to remove the legs from the table I am writing these lines on (well, I am writing them on a computer, but thats not the point). And surprise, surprise, I am moving from Central Europe. And yes, I can speak with a thick Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian (Andy Grove style) accent. If anyone had a job available for a fresh CS graduate, please let me know (email is in my profile)!

Having lived abroad for 17 years as an American, I have found a very strong correlation between those who can not understand a thick accent, and those who can not communicate well with non-native English speakers.No idea if this is the case with Paul, but if you have actually spent the time communicating with a wide range of non-native speakers, you are much better at understanding and making yourself understood. I think all you non-native English speakers know exactly what I mean.

Communication - a two-way street. That is why Paul's comments strike many as tone deaf!

Such is life. This is a requirement not just for startups, but for success in pretty much any field which isn't solitary by nature. That encompasses most businesses, including climbing the corporate ladder if that's your thing.

I was hoping for some statistics. Rather than trying to convince people, it would be a far more compelling rebuttal if there was some data to backup the comment. Without data, it's just opinion, and that reflects on the one with the opinion. With data, it's stops being personal, and in the domain of science.

This is a case where the founder has an American accent yet people did not understand what he tried to convey correctly. I think PG should have referred to founders' elocution, diction, communication skills, etc. instead of only their accents. As we've seen here one can have no foreign accent at all and you may still be misunderstood.

Look, it's the online click-generating, culture-destroying media firms' business model to generate politically correct controversies especially on the words of famous or successful people. ValleyWag is the latest monster to grow out of the repulsive Gawker empire. They will do what they have to do. The joke is on everyone else who even cares what is published there.

There are many reasons for a speaker to not communicate in an understandable way : heavy accent, speech impediment, lack of articulation, inability to articulate thoughts, etc. Why focus on the cultural accent to make your point, rather than stating the root cause : lack of sufficient verbal communication skills? The fact that you seemed to put a heavy foreign accent as the main cause of bad communication does seem a little xenophobic.

Everybody has an accent! There is not a single person in the world that has "no accent"!

This may seam like nit picking but it is in fact very important. When someone in the US says they think someone speaks English "with an accent" it's actually the fact that they are not speaking English with an American accent. Who's to say that speaking English with an American accent is the correct way?

The English language is used in many parts of the world and has diverged immensely. Pronunciation has changed, spelling has changed, words have been added, etc.

So bear that in mind when you say someone speaks bad English or wonder why don't they make the effort to speak it "correctly".

Also remember communication is 2 way. If you can't understand someone due to their accent most likely they cannot understand you due to your accent.

1. having accent is ok as far as you can make others understand your point in english ...2. bad english (i mean really bad) will be turn-off anyway with or without accent .... so it is not accent but its all about english as a language i guess ...

I've seen people with english and no bad accent but still having trouble in making other people understand :) and they are either Dumb OR they're P.hd holders (not generalizing though)...

Coming this fall to the Mountain View Community Playhouse, a classic musical updated for today's Valley:

My Fair Founder

Can master symbolicist Henry Higgins (played by Paul Graham in his first musical-theater role) win a bet by coaching ambitious but crude-speaking Eliza Doolittle to be the toast of Sand Hill Road in three short months?

I couldn't find your pricing anywhere... I'm a native English speaker, so this product isn't relevant to me, but I wouldn't want be comfortable recommending it to anyone without knowing how much it'd cost after those first 3 months. Really critical to have in an easy-to-find place on the website IMO.

I'm a native American English speaker who is also into startups (and has lived in a lot of places, communicating with non-native speakers in English, as well as my really horrible Kurdish, Pashto, Dari, French, Arabic, etc. phrases...). Observations:

1) You should fully Americanize all the spellings. It is American English people want.

2) This would be far too boring for me to stick with if it is things like "I went to the cinema yesterday". A coherent story, or even better, a domain-specific lesson, would be a much more engaging way to teach a language. I was able to learn when it was "talk to my driver about the security situation and drive plan", but never cared enough for casual conversation. I am usually happy to talk to people who speak horrible English about things I care about, which presumably for the hn audience is tech, startups, etc., but not about sports (cricket!?). If you could do a vertical-specific sayafter.me it would be awesome.

You might add something on the landing page saying what exactly you do. I read through everything and it doesn't specify how it'll improve English; is it just drills? A therapist to coach people? Pronunciation checking software?

Is there any evidence this actually works? You're motivating your product by saying it helps you keep your job if you have a thick accent. Does your product work? How does it compare to competitors? Adding this information would improve credibility.

Intervals of a few milliseconds? You could peg prices every few seconds, minutes, or hours. A trading interval of one trading session per hour would be fine. Put in all your offers to buy or sell, trading closes at 10:00:00 and then all the received trades are matched up and executed. Once per hour, once per minute, any interval works fine for the USEFUL purpose of the stock market (allocate capital). It just happens to kill off the non-useful purpose, gambling.

I would like to point out this was a theoretical operation done by this professor. It looks to me there are a few errors in his conclusions ( specifically about the risk associated with what he was pretending to do, and the nature of market making ). Also he didn't actually make an algorithm to do the trading and back test it, he just assumed that "with a good algorithm" you could do this.

Also the fact that this is represented as a broad threat to the market is just false. This only effects day traders and other HFT's. Yes the long term investor might also be hit by this to the tune of 0.01% per transaction, but the liquidity provided by HFT's almost makes up for that.

Make the system better, but do it so that the market functions more efficiently not so that people who aren't you will make less money.

I hear a lot of complaining about the HFT business, and there is plenty to complain about, but I think every so often we need to take a step back and remember what the alternative is: Insular, inefficient, corrupt, pit-based trading.

We now complain about a few pennies being scraped off of each order, which stings a little, but read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator to get some context about the dollars that used to be scraped off of each order by pit traders. Today, if you're trading a low dollar stock like Bank of America or Zynga, the vast majority of the money you're giving up to make a trade goes to brokerage, rather than to market makers like Getco.

Where computers are involved in trading, there will always be an edge to be gained from writing better, faster programs. We can take some steps to de-emphasize making programs that have a speed advantage (e.g. assign random latencies to all entered orders, or to bring all orders in each stock to trade on a single, specially-designated exchange), but I'll take computers over pit traders any day.

How much is he starting with to make that $377k? If I had ten million dollars to play around with, I could easily make that in a day. That figure it meaningless if it's not relative to something. What % return is it?

I've been wondering - couldn't you just impose a small delay, say one or two seconds, on each order - forcing everyone to wait a moment to get their order on the order book.

Seems like that should eliminate high-frequency trading altogether?

Betting exchanges use this idea to prevent people doing time-based arbitrage on live sporting events. For example, to prevent one guy who's watching a match live in the stadium gaining an advantage against someone else watching on TV, where the pictures are delayed a few seconds.

The economist's preferred trade stoppages don't eliminate the advantage of trading fast, they only reduce it somewhat. If the stoppages are a little out of phase globally, they may actually increase it.

When buying and selling stocks on timescales of weeks to years, HFT doesn't effect my strategies nor outcomes in any meaningful way (except to provide exact pricing at the moment I send in a trade).

Darn. I thought I was going to make 377 000 dollars a day. That would have been around $94M trading stock. Now I have to work for a living... Instead I got this article about fair game. Whats up with that=)

Scientific calculators usually provide constants such as e and but there was no space in the ROM for these constants. The Sinclair Scientific used the brilliant solution of printing the constants on the calculator's case

Unfortunately, as calculator prices collapsed, so did Sinclair Radionics' profits, and the company was broken up in 1979 after heavy losses.

He fought Moore's law, and the law won.

But this whole thing reminds me of Woz's work in the first Apples. Why wasn't his genius work similarly wiped out? Soon after the Apple, there were dozens - hundreds - of new personal computer manufacturers.

I think it's software. The value of a platform is what you can do with it. Software increases what you can do, therefore increases the value of the platform. There's increasing returns, so once it gets started, it gets harder and harder to stop.

Branding is also important (Jobs), which is why the Apple eventually fell to the "PC" - because the strongest computer brand in the world for decades was IBM.

The bit that is probably most striking to modern eyes is the data representation. With 320 instructions there's simply no room for the "obvious" code to translate to and from a display representation. So everything was stored in BCD and operated on one (decimal!) digit at a time using a 4-bit ALU.

I really wish someone would make a modern scientific calculator - Imagine what would be possible on a modern ARM processor. Even the new HP calculators use old ~70mhz ARM processors emulating the even older saturn HP48 code...

You could build it on top of Android, and have the software be open-source while making money from selling the hardware (so you could run it on a touchscreen, but if you wanted a keyboard you'd buy the calculator).

While clever and inexpensive, the low speed and low accuracy of this device made it unusable. It was billed as "3-figure accuracy", but in fact it only got that on some cases. A bright undergrad or grad student could quickly uncover useful problems that it flat out couldn't solve.

In short, it was a toy. Anyone basing one's academic grade on this thing was a fool. You really did have to spend the money for an HP-35, or the later Texas Instruments SR-5x calculators that were less expensive.

If you need to explain this too less geeky friends thentelling them that this amount of storage is less than a single letter on a modern display. Which on a 32bit display at 12x12 you would be on 576 bytes (8 bits) and this is compared to a 320 11 bit word (320x11/8=440) 440 bytes.

This makes chess on a 1k zx81 including display seem like bloat-ware now :).

Nowadays we have more storage on the keyboard controller chips, heck the older ones during the 90's had 4 KB storage, so almost 10x more ROM alone to work with - for a keyboard.

What's more interesting than how the calculator works is how Sinclair was able to write the code for such a chip, which the article doesn't attempt to guess at. I wonder if he used some kind of boostrap on paper, looking at the algorithms.

I recently started an Open Source club at my school, and one of the key aspects of the club is that I (along with a few others) give quick tech talks. I found that it took far too long to whip up a short slideshow, so I wrote this. Its entire purpose is to allow you to get something presentable and interactive out quickly.

It's sort of a two-birds type deal because we'll be actively working on this project through the club :)

But that's a bit of a hard-sell when I'm trying to open non-softie eyes to the benefits of markdown-everywhere (as they have to encounter HTML too). So yeah, I realise that a regex that replaces `---` with the above and hoicks it into a Reveal.js template is (almost) all that is needed to achieve what this project does, but I'm thankful for it all the same.

Worth noting that I've also used the `slideshow` gem [2] back in the day. This does basically the same thing as this project, and with the Google HTML5 Rocks [3] theme it isn't bad as a 'just markdown to slideshow' tool, but it was a bit fiddly to get started and 1) that homepage is a big undersell with all the old crappy themes/defaults on it and 2) I think their version of the Google deck is now pretty outdated (was buggy when I used it). Still, worth looking into for Rubyists I think.

IANAL, only an entrepreneur, but this should surprise no one even passingly familiar with trademark law. Failure to enforce your trademark's registration can expose you to claims that your mark is no longer "in use." Sure, this guy might be 100% innocent, but it won't matter when someone less innocent comes along and uses the fact Tumblr didn't enforce their trademark against this other guy to be annoying.

It's easier to just shoot an email to your attorneys and have send a C&D than it is to enter into a more protracted, ad hoc conversation. It costs virtually nothing to do this. Some associate at the firm types it up using one of a bajillion templates, sends it out with a partner's name attached, and bills the client for <30 minutes worth of time.

You, too, can hire an attorney and pay them a few hundred dollars to reply! Or you can try replying yourself.

C&Ds are not legally binding, of course, and the recipient can choose to comply, respond, or ignore as they see fit. Because of how trademark law works I wouldn't recommend "ignoring" since the complaining party is pretty much obligated to escalate matters.

For example, a friend of mine created a parody website of a world-famous newspaper and predictably received a C&D. This was more than just the trademark: it repurposed content, used the same typefaces, mimicked the same layout, etc. They agreed to let him use it after he replied and agreed to include a prominent disclaimer up top stating that "<Newspaper> trademarks used with permission of <Newspaper Corporation>" and explaining that this was a parody.

I don't know if the OP tried to do this, but I will say turning to the "court of public opinion" as a first course of action makes this outcome somewhere between incredibly unlikely to impossible.

Tumblr isn't trying to be evil -- you're using their name, after all -- they're just trying to take care of it in the most time-efficient manner possible. The #1 most time-efficient manner is sending a C&D. For folks whose infringements are minor and inconsequential, it's likely that the #2 most time-efficient manner is to let them use the name in the domain with a prominent disclaimer and an explicit, albeit revokable, license.

Looks like this was a quick semi-joke website. If Tumblr didn't like what message it sent (which is understandable) ... they could have started with a simple email to the guy. Heck, they probably could have just asked him to change the messages so that it was slightly less snarky. If he didn't want to play ball, then sure ... C&D away. But what happened to plain old being nice?

I sympathize with the author and his concerns about Tumblr's disregard for its users.

Having said that, companies have a legal responsibility to take "all steps necessary" to protect their trademarks. Unfortunately, this responsibility sometimes requires them to engage in seemingly nit-picky litigation.

An excerpt from chillingeffects.org [1]: If a trademark owner fails to police his or her mark, the owner may be deemed to have abandoned the mark or acquiesced in its misuse. A trademark is only protected while it serves to identify the source of goods or services.

I'm not saying that IsTumblrDown had negative intentions or that it blatantly obscured Tumblr's brand; I never had a chance to use the site, so I didn't see how the name was incorporated into it. I'm just saying that firms like Tumblr are sometimes under external pressure to be aggressive in enforcing their trademarks.

Missing E's warning is to indicate that using a third party plugin to alter the sites behavior - which is constantly being improved and worked on - could have negative effects. If something breaks due to Missing E not working with an update that gets pushed out, then disable Missing E. Check the first page of the Missing E blog, and almost every post is regarding an update due to Missing E breaking in some way due to incompatibility. Seems pretty straight forward to me?

I wonder if this is a case of them requiring by law to defend their trademark, though then I wonder why they can't just license it for $1 per year for the exact use currently being used - so you can't then just go get a license and change everything to be different..

Having yet to see the C&D, the mostly likely reason for this would be utterly boring but entirely rational trademark enforcement/infringement. Odds are, a human only signed the letter without so much as reading it or asking anyone in management for a second opinion.

Re. the implementation of weather prediction: the api that powers the dark sky iphone app is free for >1000 requests a day: https://developer.forecast.io/ -in sf this kind of data is doubly useful too (weather that changes quickly

I'm accustomed to popular blog blowhards repeating the "you can't write code on an iPad" mantra, but I expect better here. We all know you can write code on an iPad, right? Off the top of my head, I can think of free/cheap apps in the app store for JavaScript, Python, Scheme, Perl.

Or Lua... my kids have my hand-me-down iPads. Each has Codea installed. Codea is a gorgeous Lua development environment with a great on-device editor and great libraries for sprites, sound, touch, accelerometer, and physics.

For some things, the Codea editor is better than what I use at work. For instance, if a function takes a color value as an argument, when the cursor is in that character position, a color picker pops up. Likewise, when using the sprite command, instead of typing in a name you can open a popover that displays a list of sprites on the device. It pulls assets from your photo library or links to your dropbox, so you can easily get assets in and out of the device.

My daughter decided to make a program to implement the sorting hat from Harry Potter. She googled for images of the sorting hat and other harry potter things, saved them to the device, and spent an hour obsessively re-writing her draw function so that things appeared where she wanted them to. She was stumped by randomness, so I helped her look in the built-in reference for math.random() and, with another assist on how to write an if-else block, she figured out how to use it. Keyboard input was rougher (Codea lacks the common UI widgets) but she got something working to her satisfaction.

So, after a few hours of playing around, she had a fun little sorting hat toy. She understands variables, incrementing variables every frame to create animation, what the word "random" really means (as opposed to her previous definition for the word, from some Disney channel show), and how to do some basic if-else flow control. Now when people ask her about her iPad, she says she knows Lua and shows them her sorting hat.

Codea can export directly to an Xcode project, so next weekend we're going to turn her sorting hat game into an app and install it on her iPad. I think that's when she'll be fully converted into a mobile app developing geek.

So, the article... there's a fun walk down memory lane (I, too, goofed off in school writing games for a programmable calculator) but it's unfortunate that he framed it with a TI-verus-iPad. Plus, his conclusion is just plain wrong.

I too wrote my first code on a TI-81. Though I had been making games for a while with various tools (e.g. TGF), it was nice to finally close the loop and write in a programming language, even if it was only BASIC. That pushed me to take a programming course in high school the following year. I was writing pong and asteroid clones and ray casting engines in class.

The author's points about the iPad seem pretty accurate. I can't even imagine how I would go from having an iPad as a high school student to stumbling into programming.

I haven't developed in iOS, but I did play around with Android and the thing that really frustrated me was that the sample games were several files and ~1,000 LOC. We're talking really simple games and the amount of boilerplate crap was mind boggling. To even get to that point, of course, you have to screw around with an IDE, plugins, an emulator, etc.

Graphing calculators are entirely unnecessary for learning high school/college mathematics/physics/etc. (though they might be useful for engineering students working on-site where access to a full computer is impractical I don't have such experience with that, so cant comment).

There is no good pedagogical reason for assigning problems to students which use numbers that cant be worked out easily on paper or with a regular scientific calculator. Forcing students to expend effort on keeping track of many-digit numbers is in general an unnecessary mental load which distracts from the concepts being taught. Including "how to use your calculator" sections as part of mathematics instruction, and assigning "calculator problems" which include e.g. unreasonably complex symbolic integration problems or unreasonably precise numbers, for the sake of giving students practice with a graphing calculator interface is a waste of teacher and student effort.

Additionally, Because Texas Instruments has so effectively lobbied textbook authors and test writers and school administrations to get their calculators on the list of approved/official devices, many students are prompted to spend an unreasonable amount of money on calculators which they do not need. Its something like a tax on those students.

TI graphing calculators have awful, obtuse interfaces. Their programming and debugging tools are rudimentary and outdated. Their graphics capabilities are limited, and graphics made with them cant be used for any other purpose or easily shared. Students would be much better served by lessons/mentoring on the use of regular general-purpose computers and programming languages, whether for mathematics or whatever else. If they need symbolic integration or graphing capabilities for solving some concrete engineering problem, or for exploring, they would be much better served by a tool such as Mathematica or Maple [or heck, Python] than by a TI calculator. Full computers are much better for inputting and interacting with data and mathematical structures.

It's been 9 years since I was in high school. But on principle, I never bought a graphing calculator, and I never found it to be any disadvantage in any course I encountered in high school or college [except, briefly, on the AP Calculus test, where I had to familiarize myself with the TI83's awful UI on a borrowed calculator during the test; it didnt end up hurting my score]. However, I found programming in Maple, and later Python, to be invaluable in solving all sorts of problems.

Anyone ever play "Dope Hunter"? Actually I forgot what it was called exactly, but it was like a Legend of the Red Dragon type game, except you were a drug dealer, and it worked on TI-81s.

I agree with the OP that iPads currently restrict most users to being consumers, rather than programmers...but I'll admit, I didn't know many people who finagled around with creating or modifying TI programs...we mostly just distributed programs, downloaded from the Internet (or BBSes) among ourselves. However, the interface of a calculator was (understandably) pretty painful, so I think some of the more industrious of us did hack our own routines for common calculations. Even that kind of rudimentary programming/problem-solving isn't possible from the iPad or its more popular educational apps.

I still have my TI-92+, it was the pinnacle of graphing calculators, basically running Mathematica on the equivalent of a Sun-1 workstation in your hand. And of course TI-Basic.

While the article suffers a bit from nostalgia, the central message that young people develop learning skills from 'constructable' activities (be it programming a calculator or building things in shop class) is something we have put at risk. In many ways "art" is the most important class you can take in High School since it can challenge your thinking in ways that no amount of rote memorization can.

The bottom line for me was that its great that some folks can see the benefit, but not a whole lot of ideas about keeping that spirit alive in the school system.

Back in 1990, I was given a TI scientific calculator, and some exercises to practice. I was to enter the UIL contest titled "Calculator Math" or something like that. It was a speed contest. My school (small rural public school), having the smartest and best-prepared students won at the first level of competition beating everyone. We punched our buttons furiously, we were punching buttons as fast as is possible without having registration errors. We figured nobody could beat us, since we made few errors. At the next level we competed, something went wrong. The test went as usual, we finished most of the exam in the allotted time, but did not score well enough to advance. The thing is, after about two-thirds of the allotted time had passed, students from other schools started getting up and leaving. During the exam, I smugly assumed they were giving up because I _knew_ that nobody was a significantly faster button-pusher than me, not by that large an amount. I was puzzled. Later I learned what an RPN calculator was, and began to understand what happened. I am a college instructor today, and I have yet to meet a student who knows what an RPN calculator is. Nearly every teacher's supply catalog that gets crammed into my mail sells TI exclusively.

> It wasn't until 1990, when Texas Instruments released the TI-81 graphing calculator, that the medium became a feasible platform for game design

Nonsense. People were writing calculator games long before graphing calculators were introduced. There were lunar lander games for HP and TI calculators in the late '70s and early '80s, for example. HP had a "Game Pac" for the HP-67 that included blackjack, craps, a slot machine game, a sub hunt game, an artillery firing game, a space war game, a game based on "Mastermind", Nim, and more.

The HP-41C, introduced in 1979, and (amusingly) discontinued in 1990 (the year the author says game design became feasible on calculators) had an alphanumeric display so it could do word-based games, and Hangman and an an Adventure-like game were available.

Great article. I used to ask girls for phone numbers and such by borrowing their calculators and writing a small program. For my biggest crush I wrote her a program that spit out nice quotes whenever she ran it, what a blast.

My response to the article though is that kids today have iPads and other tablets and they will delve into those they way we embraced the TI-83.

I'm going to have a hard time with this when the school district mandates that my son use a calculator that has an "Equals" key.

We've always been an HP family. RPN all the way. I literally am unable to use a TI calculator (well, they may well have Enter keys now -- I know the newer HP calcs have Equals keys of a sort, which you can ignore). My son will not be using a scientific calculator as broken as the TI ones.

You think I'm joking. I'm not. (I'll probably have to relent and let him use a TI, but I'm going to show him RPN first...)

In high school my friends and I decided that once we understood the concept of, say, the Pythagorean Theorem, making us solve it over and over again was busywork. So we made programs to solve things, and then an application called AMATH to collect all those programs.

At one point the teachers caught wind of this app everyone was using, and made everyone start showing their work. So I reprogrammed my modules to show their work, line by line. I soon forgot about all of this and went into an unrelated area of study at university; I think I only ever took one college-level comp sci class. Today I make my living in mobile apps.

I used to have a Palm device. It had a black and white 320x320 screen, slow CPU, low memory, and no Wi-Fi. But I could run PocketC on it and work on a hobby game project, either on a computer or the device itself.

A few years later I got an iPhone 3GS. It had a much faster CPU, better screen, wifi and 3G Internet with a browser that could display desktop websites. It was leaps and bounds more powerful and capable than the Palm device, except I couldn't actually develop any pet game project on the device itself (in a C-like language; I suppose JS dev is possible).

I agree with the author that the iPad could definitely be a more approachable platform. However, I think that the comparison to a TI-83 is also a little bit naive. The TI has a 64 x 96 pixel greyscale display. The iPad's resolution 2048 x 1536 in full color with a quad-core dedicated graphics processor. In order to work with that, we have huge APIs implementing complex abstractions. And all that extra complexity must be dealt with using an antiquated programming language with horrible syntax.

Yes, we could create some kind of simple emulator that makes it possible to write simple things as easily as they could be done in TI-BASIC. But what kid wants to write a nibbles or mario clone when they can with a few finger taps be playing a 3D shooter or racing game. The simple reality is that we are no longer in the frontier days of computing, and I would argue that our languages and abstractions haven't kept pace with other advancements. The easy things have all been done. And the interesting things that haven't been done are hard. That has a significant role in what the author is talking about.

There are also other forces at play--such as the very large economic interests that exist around programming iOS--that weren't a factor for TI back in the day. So while I'm all for the author's thesis that things should be more explorable, I think he's ignoring the fact that a significant amount of essential complexity has made that a much more difficult proposition than it used to be.

The author has a grasp of education that probably wouldn't have occurred to me. I love the sentence "It may be tempting to see convention and subversion as incompatible, but education thrives in the healthy tension between the two."

I personally learned to program nearly 20 years ago, when I was 13. I was fortunate enough to have a computer around the house and was pretty familiar with MS-DOS and the various conventional memory incantations required to run Games, and I'd played around with GW-BASIC but my family was visiting some relatives' house where I found and picked up what I consider to be one of the most formative books of my life: C for Dummies. For some time, we'd had a copy of Borland C lying around the house, and a copy of K&R, but I could not get into it, though I'd made a few stalled attempts. But this book... it brought the computer alive for me.

Fast forward to today, I am technically self employed, though most of my work is a full-time contract with a single company, and I make a low six figure income. All because I learned to play and experiment with that beautiful thing called programming, because of C for Dummies. Dan Gookin (the author) changed my life, in much the same way that the article's author was changed by the discovery of the programming tools for the graphing calculator.

I am a high school dropout, and very nearly failed out of two universities before completing my bachelor's in Comp Sci after 8 years of attempts. I have historically had a tough time of conventional learning, though I believe I've matured enough for this to have changed over the last few years. Programming taught me discovery, experimentation, a whole, whole lot of getting shit wrong, how to figure out solutions to poorly defined problems (which usually first requires coming up with a proper definition of the problem), and so much more.

Programming is a beautiful thing. My friends just had a baby girl and at their baby shower they had a little 'time capsule' where people could leave notes for the baby to read in the coming years. Mine said that I would be happy to teach her how to program.

For me, programming is a big part of life!

Finally, I love the fact that a non-professional programmer embraces and sees the value in this.

What if that liberty, that sense of discovering how to change it was not an intended side effect, and the more controlled ipad environment is?

agree that exposure to that "primitive" environment and the desire to create something great would force the user to make use of ingenuity.agreed that incredibly constrained tools and no very high level language is included, yet still reducing high level problems to low level instructions can allow to discover and see something that could have been hidden by better tools.

All the exams I have ever written (grade 1 to post grad) specified graphing calculators are prohibited. Every last one. Graphing calculators tend to be programmable and/or can save text files & local educational institutions didn't want to go there.

Never really had a graphing calculator when I was in school. Bought 92 Plus years later just to have a ultraportable "computer" for field work. LCD screen is starting to decay after years of use, so I picked up another in "mint" condition for $40 at a used book store.

Would love to take the old one and replace the screen and processor with something more modern, keeping the keyboard.

Perhaps the author's arguments about the benefits of graphing calculators are legitimate, but there is no reason that this is specific to TI. TI 8* calculators seem to me to be particularly overpriced and lacking in modern features.

It's a shame that iPads are being pushed so heavily in the educational space. Apple products are built upon denying users access to learn about the hardware and software. Educators should be fighting against walled gardens.

Is a graphing calculator really the most obvious way that a young and impressionable mind will find an inroads to programming in this day and age? I find that idea laughable. Tinkering on the web is the obvious modern-day equivalent that is completely neglected when talking about how hostile the modern environment is towards the young creative spirit.

Their entire business is predicated on steering you away from using your credit or debit card (better for you) to a direct bank withdrawal (better for them).

Bank withdrawals carry a risk of overdraft fees, have fewer consumer protections, and lack the rewards programs and other benefits of cards. But they cost less for PayPal. Merchants don't pay any less though -- it's how PayPal makes money.

Each and every time it defaults to bank withdrawals. You have to hit "Change" to select your card, every time. There's no way to change the default to your card. The only reason for this UI is to steer customers away from their best interests.

One of the most Pavlovian I've encountered is in InAppPurchases. A confirm button will be repeated in the same corner of a dialog box 9 out of 10 times, but the 10th time it will be replaced with a single-click purchase.

Basically the UI Is set up to purposefully hotswap to confuse the user into accidental purchases.

I've also seen purchase buttons placed extremely near edges in order to capture edge gestures and convert them into purchases.

Hi, I'm the guy who started darkpatterns.org. It's nice to see it popping up on HN every now and then. We're actually looking for contributors to help edit and update the content. If anyone is interested, drop us a line (contact details on the site). It's intended to be a community project and we'd love to see a lot more faces and names on the about page.

Thanks to the author for including RyanAir's awful booking reservation website. This piece of garbage is filled with traps and puzzles in order to sneak additional costs onto you. God I hate this carrier a well as the world's "cheaper is better" attitude.

But, taking these to a natural conclusion typically results in exactly the Dark Patterns we see here: where users are tricked or misled into agreeing to things they might not if they were offered clear, open and full disclosure upfront.

We can identify dark patterns - but in many cases, these are here because they work. At least, large international businesses such as RyanAir believe that they have a positive outcome which overwhelms any damage to the brand.

I would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses?

I am not sure if it is a dark pattern, but I hate it. Hidden tax/shipping costs. I have to go through the entire check out process, which is usually multiple screens, and requires a credit card to continue to find out how much shipping will be at the final confirmation screen. Is this done on purpose so they think people are already invested in the checkout, so they won't abandon it due to high shipping? Or notice shipping? I don't understand why not just give me an estimate based on fuzzy location before I start the checkout process, so I don't waste my time if the total cost is too high.

Open question: as a startup grows and matures, even if it is originally entirely designed with honest user objectives in mind, where usability and simplicity are paramount, at some point there will be calls to increase revenues - either in response to declining growth, market saturation, or simply to maintain existing growth.

Is there any way to structure the incentives of a business to prevent this from happening as a business grows?

Intuitively there is an argument that maintaining simplicity will improve word-of-mouth and conversion rates, but in reality it (unfortunately, perhaps) absolutely is the case that revenue can be massively increased by introducing all kinds of additional advertising, up/cross-sells, and ultimately, dark patterns.

There a nice book on "evil design patterns" called Evil by Design [1]. It's interesting knowing how we are manipulated (and how we can manipulate others, not necessarily for bad reasons) through design.

Many of these could just as easily be the result of really bad UI design, especially when there are "technical constraints"the RyanAir example in particular reeks of an opt-out being jammed haphazardly into an existing form to avoid adding another control.

Hanlon's Razor, yadda yadda. These patterns aren't any better if they're accidents, of course, but there'd at least be a chance that the offending company would fix them.

I guess we need to make an distinction between short and long term conversion optimization.

How does a new and unexperienced customer at Ryanair feel when he sees the final amount he has to pay? It's obviously a good first conversion, but does it pay off a the second and third etc conversion for ryanair? Does he recommend the service?

He has other choices and the one that tricked him doesn't feel that good anymore...

A possible example of this is how the 'Clear Browsing Data' button in chrome for android has been moved to an inconspicious location away from the other settings, if you have an android device i invite you to see how easily you can find it without looking it up.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing I've heard all day was when Burke said it was OK to collect all the data because it'll be ignored when those who control it are not interested in it.

"They don't care about ME! They only take notice of people when they're connected to an group or event that is being monitored"

Well no shit. Thats like saying a tyrannical government only silences those who oppose them. They don't care about you today, but as soon as you stick your head up everything you've said and all your human connections are immediately tagged. I find that discomforting! And what a poor showing from the interviewer not to mention this.

something is going to change within 40 years to change our lives as greatly as the changes since we came from the caves to modern day.

The problem is that, as we try to solve privacy, feeding the world, etc we spend months of time discussing these short term problems in board rooms and parliament whilst labs around the world are working on nanotech

Richard Fynman said that there is "no physical law against creating a personal nanofactory", like a 3d printer, to print anything from basically air, dirt and some Acetylene gas (for added carbon).

Everyone will be able to make anything they need for practically nothing, and this will destroy current economic systems and government.

When nanofactories appear, they will address the problem of scarcity. All our years have been spent constructing organisations and systems to share everything. There will be no need for any social institutions, as they all exist to share things, to address scarsisty.

Why would we still live in massive cities, when we have no more factories, no more need for economies of scale? People will be able to then live by themselves on a mountain using solar panels for power and no need for utilities.

Physical contact between people will happen, but be rarer and and 3d holography will be used to allow this over great distance, to allow you to talk to someone as if they are there, no screen, but if you try to touch them you'll just go through them.

We are going to live through extraordinary times over the next twenty-thirty years!

Edit - Further good bits I missed on the first pass:

In response to "You seem as optimistic as you were in 1970":

* laughs * Well you know what they say about pessimists: They jump out of the window and they're no longer involved.

Fascinating views. The privacy angle is quite in line with what is already happening. With the recent Snowden affair there has been a huge brouhaha about privacy etc. but if you look at private information that financial and retail companies already possess you will find that people actually dont care. As long as you get a 0.5% less on your mortgage or credit cards and some 10% discount on purchases, people are more than happy to have companies record every transaction that you make.

Im not sure on the nanotechnology future that he has laid out though. Specifically, what is the source of energy to transform the air/water/dirt stuff into goods and what is the rational for saying that starting with water/dirt/O2 will be the cheapest route to getting whatever stuff we need. Not convinced on that front.

I grew up watching the Connections series on VHS from my local library.

More than a decade later Netflix recommended the DVD set to me based on my preferencesIt was like running into an old flame. Watching them as an adult, they are even more amazing than I originally remember.

I would expect nano-printers to have the same effect as essentially free digital reproduction had on music, print and video. There'll be free stuff, and stuff you'll pay for. Why do people pay? Partly to be part of a community; partly because (hopefully) it's better if a whole lot of people worked on it to serve your demographic. I don't think it will change the structure of society, but will have pretty similar dynamics to present day internet.

Nanotechnology will bring real personal manufacturing at the molecular level giving people the ability to produce nearly anything for virtually nothing. This will result in the destruction of current socioeconomic systems and government as there will be no need for any type of scarcity monitoring or control or labour.

People will trend away from cities, and live in smaller more natural close knit communities. Realistic 3D holographic projections will further enable this.

He attributed the nanotechnology factory idea to the great Richard Feynman.

Burke's naivete about the externalities of an out-of-control surveillance apparatus are appalling: ignoring the fact that innocent people do get swept up for happening to match criteria of a secret scoring algorithm is just burying one's head in the sand. Instead, he alludes to a simplistic perspective that the world is a happy-clappy paradise where innocent people have "nothing to hide," and by virtual of volume of communication, shouldn't worry.

He may soon be incorrect about them not being interested in the content of your calls, only "who you speak to". Before long, always-used speech recognition will be plausible, if it isn't already. Yes, imperfect, but more information than just who you're speaking to.

I can speak to this. For a while in 2010 I was completely broke after leaving my first job out of college, which I hated, and having some other employment opportunities fall through. Having that little money changes your decision making process about absolutely everything. Obviously every financial decision is effected, even the tiniest purchases weigh into bigger questions like "will I have enough money in my bank account to pay rent on the first?" It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money. And at least for me who is fortunate enough that this was not a chronic way of life, one thing that weighed on my mind was how I was spending my time and whether I was doing enough to make sure I wasn't so broke all the time. I could imagine that at some point that sort of thinking goes away and you believe poverty is a way of life. But I can think of a variety of other meta concerns stemming from poverty that could plague your thoughts.

Mentally poverty can be an all consuming condition. I've come to think of it as comparable to programming in a high level language versus programming in a low level language. If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. Whereas if you live in poverty before you can get to some of the really productive work you have some hurdles to overcome.

Another way of thinking of the difference between being financially stable and being poor is that if you are poor it is constantly a necessity to think about short term outcomes first so your mind gets clogged up with them. It is very difficult to get to think about your long term good because failing to properly address your short term outcomes could end in complete disaster. This is why I cannot take seriously comments like this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856 although thankfully the commenter does acknowledge he is being cynical and disrespectful.

Being poor is a full time job. I have fasted for weeks without problems and yet on the one occasion in the last 20 years where I was unable to buy food for three days the hunger was severe and overwhelming - the experiences had nothing in common.

The cognitive load I have seen on friends struggling with poverty is immense - they are permanently mentally exhausted of all the hard decisions and complicated math needed to make the income last longer. When I was with a friend out buying groceries figuring out the correct amount of baby formula diapers and detergent to buy took half an hour (yeah I offered to helped with the bill, was rejected) and the amount saved compared to just throwing stuff from the shelf in the cart was less that 10% of the total.

Edit: Here is an idea for a product - easy to use program that balances the budget as good as possible while taking into account the unique challenges that struggling people are faced with.

I'm witnessing this tax first hand right, but the tax is in a more literal sense. Some background: Right now my commute is about 35 minutes through Southern California (I live in Riverside and drive south to the Inland Empire). On Tuesday, my car was totaled. I was in the middle lane on a 3 lane highway when I saw someone coming up behind me a couple of miles before my exit, so I got over to the slow lane. Right as the car behind me was passing me in the middle lane, their tire exploded, spinning them into me, and spinning me across the freeway into the center divider.

This crash is an example of just how much money not having money costs. It wasn't an issue of the driver's unsafe driving, but of the driver's unsafe vehicle due to poor maintenance. Well, that driver doesn't even have insurance, let alone money to fix their balding tires. For now I'd agree with anyone that says it's their fault for driving it, because that's my insurance's stance and that's the stance that gets me reimbursed for my vehicle, but I can't help but see how if they wanted to fix the initial problem of poor maintenance and no insurance, then they'd need money, so they'd need to drive to work...

But it gets worse. My car handled the crash like a new car should. I was safe. I got a little whiplash but I felt fine and was back to work that day. Her car, much older than mine, flipped (exploding tires are about as bad as a car accident can get - keep up on your treads and watch the air pressure in the summer folks!) and she left the scene unconscious in an ambulance. Now I don't know what the statistics are, but my bet is if you don't have car insurance, you're note likely to have medical either. So this woman, who started too broke to replace her tires, now has whatever legal trouble one gets for not having insurance, has no drivable vehicle, huge medical bills, and whatever suit my insurance files against her.

Me, I'm fine, but I'm without a car (and I opted out of the rental car coverage, and she has no insurance to reimburse me for one), so in the name of frugality I start taking the bus. I go against traffic on my daily drive, so there aren't many routes, but there is one. It makes 93 stops between Downtown Riverside and my place of work. It takes about 2 hours 15 minutes with walking time. That's over an hour and a half longer than my commute driving. I'm on the bus with a few other people who make the same trip. Right now my life consists of waking up, walking to the bus, sitting on the bus, going to work, walking back to the bus, taking it home, walking home, eating a small meal, and going to bed to repeat the process tomorrow. Not to mention last night the bus was 2 hours late because of flash floods in Riverside. I got home after my bed time. Everyone this morning was taxed by pretty much all definitions of the word. Night class? Studying for that certificate to get a promotion? Reading a fucking novel? Ain't nobody got time for that.

This is a very interesting article, but the experiment, as described, doesn't seem to back up the thesis. They show that people who have less money are more taxed by financial questions, but that could just as easily be a cause not an effect of poverty. (ie, it could back the notion that it's trying to refute.) The article did mention a similar study in India where they tested people who were seasonally poor, but it didn't mention whether their scores changed after they received their harvests. That seems like the crucial point.

Now that all of these perspectives have come together, the implications for how we think about poverty and design programs for people impacted by it are enormous.

So you mean it might be a bad idea to endlessly complicate the tax code and setup massive, complex bureaucracies all in the name of helping the poor? There's a chance they might not have the cognitive bandwidth to traverse these boondoggles designed to help them?

Simplicity will liberate as many or more people from poverty as generosity.

This is really interesting when correlated with the arguments over WalMart wages vs Costco wages; your average WalMart shop floor employee already has a cognitive load issue "comparable to the cognitive difference thats been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults."

Makes you think twice about what you pay your employees. Also it guides thinking on how employee benefits, like food available on campus, can benefit your company; especially in the information worker realm.

The experiment really doesn't match up with what they're saying. It's certainly well studied that making difficult decisions taxes you mentally, and it's not surprising that spending $1,500 is a more difficult decision for someone with a lower net worth.

Where it falls apart is with the assumption that only the poor have to make difficult decisions. If anything, wealthier people spend a lot more time making decisions at work and receive commiserate cognitive load. Not sure working at McDonalds requires you to make any decisions at all.

Even if we're going to pretend that financial decisions are the only decisions in life, I still think the poor might expend less cognitive energy. Frequently they are poor because they specifically avoid making financial decisions. (Hence that's not a cognitive load.) On the flip side, people with more significant assets have to make more significant/difficult allocation decisions, etc.

This makes perfect sense. If you're all stressed out trying to figure out if you'll have next month's rent or how you're gonna eat this week, you won't have the mindset to read a good book, consider how to improve your life in the long term or just relax your mind with some smooth jazz.

A sorta near-topic question.

How often do people check their bank account balance? I've been told I'm odd for not checking at least once a week. Do people who have more money not bother checking it? I only check once a month, when I'm about to pay my mortgage. Sometimes not even then, which means I don't know what my balance is for 2 months.

>>low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests

Wouldn't highly busy people with a lot of stuff to worry about such as startup entrepreneurs, chief level executives also perform poorly on cognition tests? Doesn't that prove that when your mind is busy at any level of Maslow pyramid, cognition tests and other games become trivia to ignore?

So IMO, these results tell more on attitude towards cognition tests than cognitive power. Au contraire, it can be argued that, people in need focus more on what matters by ignoring noise including tests. So necessity is the mother of positive change and maybe of innovation?

This is a good paper but I believe it is misinterpreting the results. There is strong evidence that people have a limited capacity for making tough decisions. This "willpower" or "bandwidth" gets used up as decisions are made. I think the right interpretation of the results of the experiments is that fixed price decisions are tougher decisions for poorer people than for richer people. This interpretation would differ from "poverty impedes cognition" in the decisions of richer people to bigger price tag scenarios. I would expect asking richer people about what they would do if their house were destroyed in a plausible way not covered by their insurance would induce a similar cognitive impairment.

Poverty is a great opportunity for startups. There's huge pent up demand for crowd sourcing of the Mechanical Turk variety. There's no real reason a person shouldn't be able to work anytime, using just a smartphone, and earn a middle class income. This is going to be huge next year, 2014 will be the year of the crowd-work.

I imagine this could also be applied to startups running out of cash. Not only do you have the stress of all the implications of running out of cash, but getting more cash becomes the number one priority, over things that you would otherwise be doing if you were flush. You might have to take on cash from sources you would otherwise decline. You might have to start thinking about doing client work. Fun stuff.

No it doesn't. I've been poor. There is no 1 standard deviation IQ penalty.

"The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty..."

Again, no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations on average. This is usually IQ, but will often be something like physical disability (ie., blindness), ugliness, or poor socialization, inherent or learned. This does not mean that it is all right to construct a society without full employment or universal healthcare. But if people trying to help the poor continue to be taken in by the above belief, they are never going to get anywhere.

I guess I'm one of the few people(?) who like the OOM killer. If all your deployed software is written to be crash-only[1], and every process is supervised by some other process which will restart it on failure, then OOM is basically the trigger for a rather harsh Garbage Collection pass, where software that was leaking memory has its clock wound back by being forcefully restarted.

Of course, this works better when you have many small processes rather than few monolithic ones. But now you're designing an Erlang system :)

The real irony here is that airlines actually do something very much like overcommit & OOM killer when it comes to reservations, and for precisely the same reasons: they know that not all the reservations will be used at the same time, but sometimes they do end up double booked, so then someone has to be kicked off the flight.

That post is a great, poetic allegory. But ultimately, I think the analogy presents a bad idea. The allegory makes the point that we could entirely avoid OOM errors by engineering a system such that resources are never overcommitted. This is true; we could do that.

However it would be bad.

Under-committing resources (thus removing the need for an OOM killer) will NOT lead to a net gain compared to over-committing resources (and thus requiring an OOM killer of some sort).

If we are unwilling to overcommit resources then it would be woefully uneconomical to run algorithms that have bad worst-case performance (because to avoid over committing you would necessarily need to assume the worst case is encountered every time).

Ultimately, we need to treat every system like a soft real-time system, because at the end of the day every program has timeliness requirements and has resource constraints. The current POSIX model does not provide such abstractions and I think that's why we have these debates about OOM killers.

The few cases when Ive seen OOM invoked, it took couple of minutes to kill chromium after flash (of course) messed up, during that time the system was unresponsive and it killed few random smaller processes until it hit the correct one, flash or chromium in some weird interdependent bug. Either way, I wasnt too happy.

After a while I noticed when the bug triggered/the system started becoming unresponsive, and I had a terminal with killall -9 chromium & killall -9 flash-plugin ready to go, so I could myself preempt it and OOM wouldnt get involved. There has to be better mechanism than OOM.

Some years back I was flying a small commuter who used small prop type airplanes (I call them pterodactyl air). Part way through the flight, I noticed one prop seemed like it was not working, so I leaned forward to alert the co-pilot (the plane was that small). He told me that they would turn off one engine and "feather the prop" to save fuel. I told him that I would be happy to take a up a collection back in the cabin from the other passengers to pay for the extra fuel to power both engines. He chuckled, but I was serious. I never flew with them again.

Maybe there is a way to suspend a process (feather the prop) rather than completely kill processes.

My memory is a bit hazy in this area, but I think by default memory is over committed in Linux. What that means is malloc() can return an address that doesn't have physical memory assigned in the page table. Memory isn't committed until it is written to.

This isn't the case with the default MSVC implementation of malloc() in Windows. In Windows address space is reserved and committed with VirtualAlloc(), and typically that is done in one step.

I think memory is over committed because Linus wanted to keep the memory footprint lower than NT early on in the development of the kernel. The drawback is applications may segfault when writing to memory that was successfully returned by malloc().

Here's a novel way to deal with an out of memory situation caused by slow memory leaks in a long-running server process: start swapping memory that hasn't been touched in literally days or weeks to /dev/null, and pray the process doesn't ever need it again.

Or, here's a crazy idea: how about we actually allocate the memory when you call malloc(), and if there isn't any, give you an error instead? Programs could check the return code and decide what to do when they run out of memory themselves. Crazy, I know.

I'm very surprised that the 'sudo' timeout feature wasn't implemented against the system's RTC using something like CLOCK_MONOTONIC. Or put differently, the idea that you'd use absolute time to implement a requirement that's defined in terms of relative time seems a bit absurd. Anyone have any clues as to why this wasn't implemented that way?

For reference, CLOCK_MONOTONIC is defined in time.h and is part of the POSIX standard.

From the 2004 version of 1003.1:

CLOCK_MONOTONIC The identifier for the system-wide monotonic clock, which is defined as a clock whose value cannot be set via clock_settime() and which cannot have backward clock jumps. The maximum possible clock jump shall be implementation-defined.

Edit: This is also an excellent example of why "nullability" is a really, really important concept. If the choice was to delete the timestamp file rather than set it to a magic number which is also an allowed value, this issue could be avoided by simply treating "missing timestamp file" as a timestamp value of -inf.

Edit 2: Just doing a bit more reading on this... on many platforms CLOCK_MONOTONIC resets on reboot, so that's no bueno unless combined with a surefire reboot detection method (if you know of one, go answer my StackOverflow question here [1]). You'll also want to fail the check if the time value read is less than the one stored (indicates overflow or other tampering, and overflows should be far enough apart that this will never happen). It's also subject to NTP time slewing [2] which could be another attack vector. Some systems have support for a CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW which is not subject to slewing, however I don't believe this is part of the POSIX standard, and if you were to use this there's a decent chance it wouldn't be very accurate on systems with cheap/noisy/otherwise-inaccurate RTCs.

This is quite a common way to bypass sudo (get access to a user who already logged in as sudo and reset clock), I remember seeing the same exploit (or variations) time and time again, for multiple systems.

How much sense would it make to annotate a variable as being representative of a "present time" and then have the compiler insert a check that the variable must be greater than the time at which the file was compiled (plus or minus some fuzz to account for daylight savings and time zones)?

The user has to be an admin and have executed sudo previously for this to work. I hope that anybody who's smart enough to have access to this command (and admin membership) is equally qualified to parse scripts that may exploit this vulnerability...

Right now there are 12 countries that are EU members and who's citizens cannot have Google merchant accounts and therefore cannot sell apps on Google Play. And this isn't even mentioning the countless others that aren't supported.

They promised they'll work on adding more countries, but it's has been years since the Marketplace opened and it hasn't happened.

Their policy also bans other payment processors, so the only way for us to monetize apps is to either serve ads or to start a company in another country, which is a huge PITA.

I do not have problems with either the iTunes Store, or with Amazon. Amazon in particular simply sends cheques by snail mail. What's so hard in doing that?

For a company with the ability to move mountains, all I can understand from this is that Google simply doesn't care about developers like myself.

Their example policy has some very surprising terms. When you click on an advert, they'll send them your email address. Really? Apps do that kind of thing? That's truly scummy and shouldn't be allowed, EULA or not. No-one expects that kind of privacy invasion on a web browser ad, why should it be allowed in an app?

And the relevant text in the intro points out that these are guidelines to help you follow the policies: "The sections below highlight best practices and common examples to help you avoid the most common types of policy violations."

> [paraphrased] Anyone else having a problem with the link automatically being closed nearly instantaneously in a new tab? Clicking the link to open it in the same tab works fine.

This is weird, I'm having a similar problem on Chrome/OSX. Dragging the link to an empty spot next to other tabs works fine. I think that is a UI equivalent of copying the link and pasting it into a blank tab.

I suspect it's some JS on the page that examines the referrer.

Edit: AdBlockPlus was instantly closing the tab, presumably because the URL contained "ads.html"

Can I admit this? I used to admire this one aspect of the Federal government: The way they'd calmly and objectively state their case, without emotion, in indictments, in tax notices, in diplomatic letters. It was a model I strove to emulate in my correspondance in times of personal conflict.

No longer. They are increasingly vindictive and flighty.

Perhaps it was always this way, and we have the Internet to thank for giving us (as Paul Harvey would say) the rest of the story. At any rate, the loss of the calm, emotionless appeal indicates a loss of pack-leader, Alpha behavior, and among apes and most other orders of mammals, will lead directly to a loss of respect.

The product may well have been redesigned to been safer, that's beside the point.

The allegation of lack of process portrays the CPSC as unable to interact with manufacturers in a civil manner that addresses concerns constructively. If the US continues scaring off entrepreneurs, the US will be weaker, less competitive and more boring as a result of bad policies.

The larger concern is that US-based thought-leaders are leaving in droves (Woz, et al) as well as the thousand and change that queue up to relinquish their passports every year is swelling; this may be only the beginning of the flickering flame of American exceptionalism. [1]

PS: I also feel that fair reporting on this piece would give the CPSC the opportunity to comment and share its views, if even to say the token "no comment." (One side does not make a complete story.)

This is his side of the story. Some of it does seem shady on the side of CPSC, but my perspective is, Craig Zucker was making tons of money. Am I supposed to believe that the money he was making didn't override his better judgement at all?

Sounds like what happened at the end after his campaign failed was that instead of complying and executing the full recall, he terminated the company; taking all of the profits with him, and leaving the CPSC to clean up the mess while he laid on a beach somewhere. Now he's complaining that didn't pan out and he might have to give the money back.

1 - the wsj is barely distinguishable from anti-government propaganda, so they're worthless: any claims they make need to be verified with first party sources before belief;

2 - this happened:

Pediatric gastroenterology specialists responding to the survey reported more than 80 children with magnet ingestion. Most patients required endoscopy to remove the magnets or surgery to repair damage to the bowels. Twenty-six children had bowel perforation; three needed major surgery to remove a section of damaged intestine. [1]

I recently mulled this over on a project. If you have to support multiple font formats to support a variety of browsers, I think the http request latency is less of a factor than forcing all browsers to download all formats even if they won't/can't use them. I think most sites fall into that category.

Wonder how this ties in with the recent discussion over Data URI slowness on mobile [1] [2].

I have to admit I've not read all the articles in full so the question may have been answered. I see Pete did write in a comment to [1] "I haven't tried data URId fonts or SVGs but those are great ideas for follow on tests"

"It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical.It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact.It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension.It's like a text editor, but with structure. "

You can nest spreadsheet-like cells within cells within cells within cells.. and zoom in and out between the various levels of nesting.

I can't just scroll through or scan read, and I'm met with a variety of different things all at once. Everything's always visible, so I don't know what I'm looking at. I've scrolled down on the lowest level, and read a bit but have no understanding of the context. Clicking on it makes me realise where I am but I've skipped over a load of stuff in the middle so I'm scrolling back up that to find where I left off... I think this is a visual thing though rather than a major issue with the idea. Fiddling a bit I've only just found that not every node has children, but this this is only indicated by nothing happening (which is identical to something that should happen but doesn't)

This is really a different formatter for the same structure of text we've already been using, so the hyperbole is a bit of a turnoff for me.

Why do we need something new? What's being added? What couldn't I do before that's now possible? These are the things I want to know when you tell me you've got a new hierarchical document. Can I already read these well with a screen-reader? The ordering in the source would (I think) read each column individually, which wouldn't make sense. Try loading your viewer without CSS. Imagine a screenreader hitting the massive block of JSON at the bottom of the page. Why is that in the body?

I'm certainly drawn to the idea and am inclined positively towards it. I'm even willing to overlook the ridiculous hubris of "This new medium will be the way most text is read and written in the future."

However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points:

1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format.

2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer?

3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed?

I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot.

but when I see a big button called "try it now" (red flag), with testimonials (big red flag), no download (small red flag), and no mention of licensing, privacy, or cost (edit: it was just hidden), or... anything (big red flag). My experience tells me to avoid it, and to council everyone else to avoid it as well.

I don't want to be gouged, aggregated, or advertised to. I would love to use your tool. I just can't be sure you wont use that desire against me. I can't find anything on your site that will assure me that wont happen.

First of all, congratulation for pulling off a new and experimental user interface!

However, I believe, the idea that tree- or graph-like structuring of text is beneficial for reading and writing text in general, comes close to the graphical programming fallacy. Eventually, the spatial make-up fails because of the following three reasons:

(1) The manual difficulty of navigation and the count of subconscious visual cues necessary for retrieving a passage increase exponentionally as the content grows, (2) altough thoughts do seem to come in hierarchical structures, we usually dont think of text, code, stories, memories nor knowledge as visual graphs and (3) textual hints for emphasizing and linking text are more efficient and flexible than visual hints.

At first glance, Wikipedia seems like an affirmative example for graph-like structured text, but that structure is usually not used for primarily intended navigation. The articles are actually expected to be self-contained for readers with only a fair amount of prior knowledge.

Does this really need to be a web-app? Storing my Documents in the Cloud is not possible and not even desireable in most of my work environments. Even in my private life i like to be offline to work on the kind of tasks that Gingko would help me with. Just charge me a one-time fee for an Windows App (Win8 Guy here, Mac Apps would be reasonable aswell) and let me handle my data my way.

I've thought about building something like Gingko for a long time, so thanks for providing an alternative option!

This is a good concept but the execution needs some work. I'm confused that everything is visible all the time - if that's the case, why am I clicking on things? But clicking on things seems to be necessary to 'focus' on a given subject; otherwise, as you scroll, the columns get out of sync and seem to bear little relationship to each other.

I envisioned something very different from the screenshots. I expected you to be able to expand and collapse nodes, with the collapsed nodes existing only to provide a summary of the surrounding information. I can see the appeal of having everything visible so that you can just scroll through the document as you would now, but in that case the scroll positions of the columns need to be dynamically linked and there needs to be more feedback about which nodes serve as a summary or context for which other nodes.

In general, I think the process of reading a Gingko document is not clear to a first-time reader. Fixing this will require changes to both functionality and design.

Nice. The inadvertent jump to another branch can be disorienting though.

Suppose my tree structure is as so:

* a ** b *** c * d ** e *** f *** g *** h

Gingko lays it out like this:

a b c d e f g h

If I'm in the far right column, let's say I've highlighted item g and go up to item f. However, I hold the arrow key down a little too long and overshoot to item c. This causes everything to the left to suddenly jump around and disorient me.

A related issue, the layout suggests that c-f-g-h is an intended list when it isn't. It can cause readers to become confused if they're reading normally in one column and don't fully realize they've jumped to a different branch in between c and f.

Neat. A couple thoughts:1) it took me some time to figure out that I could scroll a given column when the mouse is over it... Also when the mouse is over a non-column area (background on far right/left) it would be useful if scrolling did a global scroll of all columns at the same time.

2) It could be nice if the sections M+1/M-1 (above/below) the selected section in column N were given a subtle distinct color, and then the appropriate sections in column N+1 that are nested in M+1/M-1 were given the same color. Does that make any sense? It would give a visual indication of which sections in column N+1 lie within sections M+1 and M-1, and also help to emphasize the tree nature of the layout. A different color could be chosen for M+/-2, +/-3, etc.

The research manuscript example is exciting. It would be great if authors could link directly to the part of a paper that they are citing and be able to open that up if you want to dive deeper. Linking methods to results to discussion for specific experiments would make reading through dense papers a lot easier, and maybe have a notation/jargon definition section open at the same time. It's almost like a tiling window manager for reading.

I'm a little bit concerned about how it looks on smaller screens. It looks fine on my work monitor but I only have a netbook at home right now and a lot of websites have overlapping elements that keep me from reading articles. I haven't looked at this from that computer yet though. Maybe it would help to have collapsible columns if there are issues.

What happened to the app shown in the linked Science without borders talk? That looks more useful to me, if only because it fits with the typical science paper writing workflow. How did the document editor migrate to this 2D editor?

I'm sorry if I'm rude, but the more I think of if it, the less I see the point.

The initial described problem (organising ideas in a hierarchical way) has already been solved efficiently years ago with visual mind maps. They have been used successfully to not only create the hierarchy, but also to realise that sometimes, the tree is more like a graph.

As a reader, it's infuriating to have to click all the time (or use keyboard) and have this page scrolling all around. I just want to READ, not being distracted by some kind of useless parallax effect.

As a writer, moving ideas around to get them properly organised is really painful. There is no distraction-free interface neither.

If you really want to make tool for writers, I would strongly suggest you that you take a look at tools like Ulysses or Scrivener and try to understand the rationale behind the UI choice they made.

Interesting. This is actually close to the original idea of hypertext (Ted Nelson's vision: "documents - side by side"). I would really turn down the tone. Let the reader decide how important he thinks the idea is.

Ontology/taxonomy/classification are seriously difficult things. If not semantic web would have ruled the world by now.

Structural hierarchies (chapter/section etc) may be easy to get for everyone but a navigation side panel would work too. If you build a semantic hierarchy, new users may not know how to find things; yet repeat users may be frustrated by having to go through the layers to access the items they are looking for.

I like how it organizes information spatially, like WorkFlowy. I much prefer this visual organization to tags, for example. That said, I found it hard to understand what it was, even though I'm a long-time WorkFlowy user and am very interested in this kind of thing. I wrote a post where I talked about organizing information visually in more depth here: http://colemanfoley.quora.com/Mind-Mapping-with-WorkFlowy (Registration NOT required to read).

In germany there's a movement called Freifunk.The ambition is to build a community driven open Wifi-Mesh-Network by flashing low-cost routers with the Freifunk firmware. So these routers can auto discover their neighbours and then connects via the routing protocol called batman-adv to a mesh. If there's no neighbour router, batman-adv gets tunneled over the internet to connect to the Freifunk network.It's an IPv6 network with gateways to the IPv4 internet.

The problem in Germany is, that on the country-side, there are a lot of dark holes by providing broadband internet. Some villages has to connect with 64kbit/s. We have the year 2013..What the people in these villages do is, they hire one big fibre and share it over the community driven Freifunk mesh network to gain broadband access to all the people in the village.

Fair enough to assume this will only be a local network? You need to be a registered Operator in order to have roaming agreements for connectivity to other networks.

Additionally if they are using SIM cards issued by another operator that attaches to this network it will have to remain local as the global title routing would route back to the home network's HLR that the subscriber belongs to during the location update procedure.

The OS is not 14-year-old but actually the newest reiteration of S40 which has no problems running Whatsapp, native Facebook apps, Exchange support et cetera. It is not a dumb phone but a feature phone. The OS still has its raw edges here and there[0], but it is anything but old or dated.

[0] I tried it for a week or so on a Nokia 301 and an example of a raw edge is that when using the music player and you accidentally remove the head phones, the music continues over the phone its speaker immediately. It should pause instead.

The AARP should be sponsoring this, seriously. My parents would love to own this phone, or rather I would love for my parents to own this phone. They don't want or need a data plan. They don't want to play games or get stock reports. They just want an easy to use phone with big numbers and screen that they can see.

Currently, they are using cheap, plastic phones with tiny little screens and complex OSes. They aren't durable, have poor battery life and have an appalling UI. I wanted them to upgrade to an iPhone just because its easier to use than the no-name phone they are using now. However, the iPhone has way too much capability and would more than likely confuse them.

If this Nokia "dumbphone" can deliver a sturdy phone with a simple, streamlined UI I would get my parents one in a heartbeat. Pair it with a cheap phone only plan from T-Mobile or AT&T and my Christmas shopping is done this year. :)

It feels like Nokia's missing the mark here though. Once you get below a certain threshold, you hit customers who are prioritizing price, simplicity, size or battery life. The Nokia 515 is pretty good on all of those, but not the leader on any. It's sort of the least dumb dumbphone, but not necessarily a great dumbphone.

I don't quite know who this is for... but I sure wish they'd applied the same energy to optimizing for size or battery life in a beautiful container. Something that can fit in my smaller pockets and has a great antenna would be amazing as a "going out" phone, even if it only did voice & SMS.

For such a "dumbphone", it seems to be kind of pricey, in my opinion. The camera sensor is probably the most expensive there :)

For a seriously dumb phone, I'd go for a Nokia 100 or 101 (2 sim slots). It's got absolutely nothing - not any kind of web/wap accessibility, no front/back camera or a memory card slot. A resolution of a handsome 128 x 160 and a battery life of ~35 days. All for a price of ~20-40 bucks.

I was in the process of getting mugged. Someone was pointing a gun at me and telling me to give up my things. My hand was in my pocket, and I wanted to dial 911, but I couldn't, because all the smartphones nowadays have touch screen buttons.

I still haven't joined the smartphone revolution and this appeals to me in some respects, but I wish they'd have opted for a full physical keyboard. I avoid sending texts whenever possible because T9 is such a pain in the ass compared to QWERTY.

HA! that looks awesome. Somewhat similar in looks to the LG Glance[1] that I had as my last "dumb-phone". Of which, I will say I loved the ergonomics, battery life, and durability of that phone. Honestly, the only real data function I require on my phone these days is maps... I would be very tempted to drop the data plan on go this direction. A bit pricey though, I would still probs go with a $25 phone over $150 anyway....

After the recent price drop, it ends up being only 25% cheaper than a Nexus 4, which is way more phone than this. It's not clear to me that there's anyone interested in the particular price/features intersection where this phone sits.

Could someone explain what's the idea behind Nokias longstanding strategy of flooding the market constantly with new models with very minor differences? Nokia 301 is almost identical with this new 515, and was released only 6 months ago. They seem to be releasing ten dumb/feature phones per year. I honestly don't feel like that approach results good quality end products.

Are there any dumbphones that have 4G hotspot tethering as a feature? I'm not that interested in all the extra stuff that comes in the smart phone package, but being able to tether my laptop or tablet is really useful to me.

If this can be used as a Bluetooth 3G modem for a phablet then it would be pretty useful. Big phablet for internet + emails combined with a small phone for voice. Plus the battery last more than 5 mins so it's useful for a festival :)

So it's like my current phone, but with a touch screen and a decent camera? Sounds good. I could leave my 16MP pocket camera in the car and only have one device in my pockets.

Smartphones never appealed to me. They're just bad enough at all the things I want to do with a mobile device to make it a poor value proposition. I'd rather have a nice tablet. Something like the Surface (non-RT) with a few more iterations.

Honestly, if I were getting a modern dumb-phone my top priority would be compactness and low-weight rather than battery life or build-quality. I'd want something absolutely invisible in my pocket, and any clever usage would go through a smart tablet tethered to it.

I really wish more smartphones had some of the dumbphones' features: better battery life, better casing, etc. As much as I love my Nexus 4, the battery life isn't great and I'm always worried that I will drop it and the whole thing will shatter.

Nice! I love high end dumbphones. Bad title though; this[1] is a much 'nicer' dumbphone I can buy.

radicalbyte said what I was thinking exactly: this plus a Bluetooth modem (way to share data plan between devices) plus a big phablet/small tablet would be a badass professional setup. Battery life sells it for me, but not carrying my GPS-enabled google box everywhere with me would be pretty appealing too.

Looks like this can't do email. Is there such a thing as an otherwise dumb phone that can just do email (specifically Gmail)? I can live without all the other smartphone features, but email would be nice to have.

How should one read HN on it? :DI often thought that it would be cool to have a feature phone that has extremely long battery life and a very minimalistic and thin design. I like their approach but I think it might be too expensive considering the fact that you can get a nexus4 for 199 without contract here in germany.

The problem with this approach is that it requires you to resolve conflicts when you first see them. So you can't do workflows that accumulate more than two versions of what happened. Nor can you resolve the conflict asynchronously.

I might not understand what the Datastore API is for, but if I wanted to make a simple app that could sync to Word Docs between to clients, would these .doc files get represented in this database structure (tables, records and values)? Is that data structure just for example purposes?

How would this algorithm handle changes to the same text file? Is the file a record, and each row considered a value in that record?

- Although most aspects of the algorithms have been implemented and tested in software, none of the test results are currently included.

-There is no description of how the algorithms can be applied to practical problems. Missing is a description of how you would convert data from a sensor or database into a distributed representation suitable for the algorithms.

So until someone has tried it on something, we don't know how it will perform :s

So the wrongly accused man was physically in jail at the reported time of the murder, and yet the system moved forward to imprison him for nearly two decades...because of this:

> There was a lot at stake for the detectives, who said all eight defendants had confessed. Because all of them had implicated Daniel in the murders, if Daniels confession were to fall apart, the rest of the case would be in jeopardy.

I think this is a sobering anecdote to remember when wondering why a bureaucratic decision has been made despite flying in the face of pure logic and science.

So, when a prosecutor / detective blatantly ignores contradictory evidence and end up putting an innocent person in jail, why do we not treat that as a crime? There are a number of obvious cynical answers to this, but seriously, does anyone know of prosecutors / detectives that have been charged in cases like this?

An innocent cop went to prison for 6 years until the murderer came forward with a confession. There was basically no evidence to put him away, but he was having an affair with the victim at the time, which made him suspect number one. The part that really upset me was that he was basically unemployable after he came out. He was awarded $600k in backpay when released, but $200k went to his lawyer and the rest to his ex-wife.

Reminds me of the classic James Stewart film Call Northside 777 [1], about two Chicago men falsely imprisoned for a murder during Prohibition. The real-life case it was based on ([2]) hinged on a witness identification that occurred a day after the same witness had not recognized the suspect just after arrest; the police then recorded the suspect has having been arrested the second day and omitted the failure from the record.

Both men stayed in prison until a newspaper reporter discovered the case, just as in this article; in fact, one of the men was not released until several years after the movie was made.

As a hardware and platform engineer, I can relate to the very satisfying feeling that is making a tool that enable several projects beyond what you could do by yourself.

This is why a part of me dies everytime I read "full stack engineer". Not only it is imprecise, it sounds a little sad. I like being in the bottom layers of the stack, enabling several people in the others.